The more I write about beauty, the more I realize where all of my latent ideas of femininity come from: my mother between the years of 1990 and 1996. It was during that time, apparently, that my ideal look crystallized, and now I am simply crawling toward it on fresh adult terms. One of my mother’s primary pursuits of that era? Turning herself into a redhead.

Once a month or so, using a health food–store paste resembling quicksand, she would cover her muddy head in Saran wrap and examine a copy of this very magazine until she shampooed to reveal a shade of copper natural to nobody but Jessica Rabbit. I felt a redheaded mother was distinctly special—profoundly specific, a little witchy. The only other one I knew of was a real estate agent with a perm, a very different vibe than my mother’s glossy head, which glowed fuchsia in the right light.

As an avid reader of Betty and Veronica comics, I understood the vicissitudes of hair color and reputation. Blondes were innocent and desirable in their innocence. Brunettes were shrewd, and what they lacked in shine they made up for in polish. But redheads were something else, a little dangerous—eternal interlopers. They’ve been eroticized by Botticelli and vilified by Dickens and Shakespeare since long before Jean Harlow played a home-wrecking seductress in the 1932 film Red Headed Woman. Judas Iscariot’s frequent cameos in medieval art—with an auburn mane and beard—certainly helped sow these centuries-old seeds. According to my mother, redheads were once considered so scandalous that they were actually burned at the stake.

Shirley Manson, redheaded grunge icon and Garbage front woman, recalls the pain of being ridiculed for her hair as a child. “Redheads make up less than 2 percent of the world population. It’s no surprise that we tend to be viewed with more than a little suspicion,” says Manson, who was told she was ugly so often because of her ginger strands that she started to believe it. But, like some of our greatest beauty icons (Barbra Streisand, Lauren Hutton, Dolly Parton), Manson took the feature that had been used to negate her and allowed it to radically define her. “It wasn’t until I reached my 30s that I started to appreciate being so visually unusual—and discovered the following passage in Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Lady Lazarus.’ ”

Out of the ashI rise with my red hairAnd I eat men like air.

Supermodel Karen Elson had a similar adolescent experience. “It was hard growing up and constantly being teased about the way I looked,” says Elson, who dyed her red hair an even more saturated shade of cherry in an act of defiance. “Fortunately it was the very thing that made me beguiling to the fashion world.”

Beguiling. I could use a little of that these days, if only to reintroduce myself to my own allure after an exhausting year of health issues. I was also wrapping up nearly seven years of work on my own television show, the kind of thing that defines your identity and occupies your days. I looked in the mirror and saw a tired, fearful person; I was not the self-starting, sparks-flying dynamo I had expected to be at 31. While hair color can’t solve the problems we need to solve ourselves, it can be a catalyst. I became obsessed with the need to go red.

It’s an early-summer afternoon when I arrive at hair colorist Lena Ott’s Suite Caroline studio in SoHo, practically guarding my oily, mousy-brown head. In a few hours my hair will be red, and there will be no turning back. (Other Lena, as I take to calling her, assures me it’s a punishing color to remove, as challenging to banish as it is to get right.) I worry about how I’ll feel—bewitched, beguiled, or bewigged?

The process begins with a coppery base color. I love the spice of my bangs as they’re blown dry. Never one to sacrifice depth, Other Lena pulls a few highlights forward, orangey in just the right soda-pop way, then adds a gloss. I’m left with a multidimensional color that tells a story of process and progress. This is no sad bottle job. This is red hair with purpose, the kind I’ve been searching for. For the first time in months, I feel deeply in my body, in myself.

I’m meant to wash with a Christophe Robin cleansing mask—a thick, lemony cream unlike anything I’ve ever used—to prevent fade-out, and come back in four to five weeks for a touch-up, as red hair is, unsurprisingly, not easy to preserve. “It’s definitely up there with platinum blondes in terms of high maintenance,” Other Lena admits, which becomes immediately clear when I wake up following my first shampoo to find what can best be described as a Rorschach test on my pillow.

Like this indiscernible pattern, red hair’s fiery reputation is difficult to analyze, one even Anne of Green Gables could not escape. (“You’d find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair,” she tells Marilla in L. M. Montgomery’s 1908 classic). “I enjoy this very much,” actor Emma Stone says of the redhead’s reputation for causing trouble. A born blonde whose decision to go red helped launch her career, she’s now back to flaxen but says the saucy stereotypes still follow her, no matter her hair color.

But can going red actually create an impetuous firebrand? I sure felt that way when, ten days after my coloring session, I awoke positive that I needed to shave my head. Not completely—I needed enough hair to remain a redhead. But close to the scalp, with a spiked peak, Annie Lennox–style.

Hours later, I’m at a men’s barbershop in Brooklyn as a group of what were once doubters are helping me get the red hairs off my white Cynthia Rowley minidress. They all seem pleased, impressed even. “That was brave,” the owner tells me. And I did feel brave. I felt an ownership over my body that had been given a jump start. It’s just like Manson says: “Red hair trickles into each crevice of your existence, coloring everything.” My (fake) red: stronger than extinction, wittier than lowlights. I have come to light you up and turn you on, to eat you like air—dyed pillow and all.

Watch Lena Dunham on Donald Trump, Her Greatest Fear, and Meeting Her Boyfriend on a Blind Date: